Desktop: Lenovo ThinkStation S30, Xenon Quad Core, I assume the base 2.8GHz/10MB L3, 16GB RAM, I assume the base NVIDIA Quadro 400 512 MB, I know it will have SSD, I assume 128 GB. Will also have dual 23" monitors.

OS will be Win7 in either case.

Usage: corporate development and support. Lifespan will be 5 years. I mostly use Visual Studio plus other corporate-type tools such as TOAD, PL/SQL Developer, Visio, Balsamiq, Enterprise Architect. Also Eclipse and Dimensions.

Since I have to do support, when I'm at home I can remote in to a desktop if needed, and indeed that's what I do now. That said, a laptop has a certain convenience factor, mostly that I could take it to meetings (which I avoid as much as possible). But I don't want to give up effective performance, and although either of these machines should do fine now, I worry about what the laptop will be like near end-of-life. I've had trouble with that in the past.

On the gripping hand, we are so far up the asymptote of Moore's Law with these things, maybe either one will be fine for the foreseeable future.

I'd be afraid of the laptop's thickness and weight given the hardware it'll house. The images I'm getting while googling it are a bit reassuring though. Otherwise, take the laptop, it's always convenient to be able to take it with you for whatever reason you can come up with.

Seems like a bit much for what you want it to be, especially the graphics.

As far as lifespan.. I still have a T61 from 2007 and it's doing well for me capability wise. That's just a standard Core 2 Duo 2ghz with 4GB of RAM. If that can still keep up with today's stuff I'm sure what you're getting there will be fine for 5 years.

I'd be afraid of the laptop's thickness and weight given the hardware it'll house. The images I'm getting while googling it are a bit reassuring though. Otherwise, take the laptop, it's always convenient to be able to take it with you for whatever reason you can come up with.

I have the W510 predecessor to that laptop and some of my peers have the W530 currently (I am projected for a W530 in the short term). The size of the two laptops seems equivalent. I have had no issues with my laptop as a commuter and the power is adequate for my usage as a demo machine and light development. It's heavy, but nothing outrageous. The biggest size differential is in the power brick. The 520 and 530 series got a HUGE power brick even compared to my 510's big brick.

Given that it's for work, one question to ask about the laptop: will it come with mandatory full-disk encryption software? That's becoming more common, and (speaking from personal experience) a fully encrypted HD will render an otherwise perfectly adequate computer useless for anything beyond lightweight office tasks. (My work lappy, a Core2Duo machine ::sigh:: is literally slower than my predates-it-by-6+-years pentium 4 desktop at home.)

Laptop definitely will be beneficial for those times that you need to rush to a codefest. I agree that the GPU is complete overkill if you aren't doing anything with it.

RE: encryption, I'm in the same boat as hestermofet: properly configured FDE should have very, very little effect on the performance of the machine. All our machines here in the office have FDE, and the only ones that see poor performance are the ones that got screwed up. The first couple days you usually do see a noticeable degradation of general performance, but after that it's back to normal.

Laptop definitely will be beneficial for those times that you need to rush to a codefest. I agree that the GPU is complete overkill if you aren't doing anything with it.

RE: encryption, I'm in the same boat as hestermofet: properly configured FDE should have very, very little effect on the performance of the machine. All our machines here in the office have FDE, and the only ones that see poor performance are the ones that got screwed up. The first couple days you usually do see a noticeable degradation of general performance, but after that it's back to normal.

Tell me more about this. We use PGP in house and I have avoided using it on my machine due to performance concerns. Since I use my machine mostly for demos, performance degradation would be very, very bad. I'm being stonewalled on my request for an exemption (not denied, merely ignored) and the emails from IT are becoming more threatening.

Laptop definitely will be beneficial for those times that you need to rush to a codefest. I agree that the GPU is complete overkill if you aren't doing anything with it.

RE: encryption, I'm in the same boat as hestermofet: properly configured FDE should have very, very little effect on the performance of the machine. All our machines here in the office have FDE, and the only ones that see poor performance are the ones that got screwed up. The first couple days you usually do see a noticeable degradation of general performance, but after that it's back to normal.

Tell me more about this. We use PGP in house and I have avoided using it on my machine due to performance concerns. Since I use my machine mostly for demos, performance degradation would be very, very bad. I'm being stonewalled on my request for an exemption (not denied, merely ignored) and the emails from IT are becoming more threatening.

As I've mentioned plenty of times before, I have a W520. As a development box, it's great. Handles visual studio with relative ease, and I'm confident it'd handle a lot of media-related functions perfectly well. But goddamn, I like to "forget" it on the dock at work a lot because it weighs a ton. It basically lives in its dock until the weekend where I pack it home and shove it under a chair until it's time to go back to work on Monday.

I picked a W530 over a Xeon desktop four months ago. I've got the 1920x1080 screen, a 512GB SSD, 32GB RAM, and three 24" monitors on my docking station. Sure, it's bulky and heavy compared to modern thin-and-light laptop trends, but I don't carry it around all the time just-in-case, so that doesn't matter much to me.

I don't know how much (if any) faster a new Xeon desktop would have been, but the W530 is much faster than my 2007 Xeon desktop was. And since I work on software for machine control, it's incredibly convenient to be able to take my dev environment to the machine that needs debugging. I have no regrets picking the W530.

I have used a laptop as a desktop replacement for many years. I *ALWAYS* dock it either at home or at work with an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. I only use the included display / pointer / keyboard when in meetings or on the road.

That to me is the perfect configuration. Trying to use any of the included display / pointer / keyboard full time never worked for me.

So, I guess the one thing I would say is to pay careful attention to the dock and the reliability of the dock / undock. Dell's suck. Lenovo do better. Apples are even more robust at traveling from dock to dock with infrequent standalone usage.

The Lenovo laptop keyboards and pointing devices are much, much better than Dells, so if you're ok with having the screen at arms length it's not bad working on a desk with one, but a dock with standard input devices is preferable.

If I traveled with it less I'd have gone with a W520/W530 for the RAM capacity, but I went with a T520 for the weight savings.

Given that it's for work, one question to ask about the laptop: will it come with mandatory full-disk encryption software? That's becoming more common, and (speaking from personal experience) a fully encrypted HD will render an otherwise perfectly adequate computer useless for anything beyond lightweight office tasks. (My work lappy, a Core2Duo machine ::sigh:: is literally slower than my predates-it-by-6+-years pentium 4 desktop at home.)

This is the experience I have with a Latitude E5410. Bitlocker with whatever other corporate mandated "securityware" is installed killed performance. I "solved" the issue by persuading them to deploy the corporate image onto an SSD.